Central Oregon-based, Northwest Sign Recycling (NWSR), was honored with the highly respected Innovation in Sustainability award by Sustainable Business Oregon (SBO) at the fifth annual awards event late last week.

Among twenty finalists, NWSR took the top spot in innovation in the Waste category.NWSR hydrostrips aluminum road signs, using jets of water — some 37,000 pounds per square inch — to remove old sign laminates and restore blank signs to a smooth reusable surface.

The company’s process extracts any leftover laminate fragments by vacuum, which officials say allows for “nonhazardous disposal of the waste. “With its water jets that cleanly restore aluminum signs that would otherwise require a lot of carbon to reuse, Prineville’s NWSR has become one of Oregon’s most innovative companies,” said SBO editor.In our facility, we hydrostrip an average of 15 tons per year of aluminum road signs, that have been taken down for various reasons.

Once their old laminates are stripped, they can be refaced and put back into service. This means that tonnage isn’t going back to the smelter and we’re saving the energy that would have been used to melt it down. We also recycle an additional 30 tons per year, which is processed using less energy and with a lower environmental impact compared to producing new aluminum.

The CO2 emissions not produced from the energy we saved recycling would equal those emitted by the use of 26,194 propane cylinders for home barbeques or that of 8.3 tanker trucks worth of gasoline.

NWSR works with many municipalities, government agencies, and individuals throughout the country to transform outdated, weathered aluminum signs into clean reusable blanks, without damaging the environment, and greatly reducing sign budgets. They even have the ability to flatten out bullet holes, so new reflective sheeting can be applied.“We are absolutely thrilled to have been honored with the SBO Innovation award,” said Wendie Every, managing partner of NWSR. “We all have the satisfaction of knowing we are helping reduce the amount of waste going into the landfill.”

About Northwest Sign RecyclingNorthwest Sign Recycling transforms outdated, weathered aluminum signs into clean, reusable blanks, greatly reducing costs without damaging the environment. Since opening its doors in 2004 in Prineville, Oregon, the company has worked with hundreds of organizations and municipalities regionally, throughout the Western U.S. and nationally.

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CASCADE BUSINESS NEWS

Cascade Business News, Central Oregon's business newspaper, is a local, family owned and operated by Pamela Hulse Andrews and Jeff Martin. CBN is published the first and third Wednesdays of each month. CBN is a division of Cascade Publications Inc.